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Marble boing VR

Jul 31, 2016

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In the ’90s we thought that Virtual reality was the last frontier but after a while, it disappeared but now VR is back to stay! There are many devices for sale on the market such as HTC Vive, Oculus Rift and many others will be released soon such as PlayStation VR. Another way to experience virtual reality without spending a fortune is by using a headset which is compatible with your smartphone. So the first step to realise my first 3D game was to buy a cheap 3D headset for mobile phones such as the one you see below.

Once I bought my new 3D viewer on eBay for just £15, it was time to start making the game. After sleepless nights and several beers to increase my creativity level, I decided to make a simple porting of an old game in VR. I evolved Marble Boing 3D, which you can see in some screenshots below, in Marble boing VR . In short, not a stupendous undertaking but a simple porting to understand the basic concepts of VR. As usual, “keep it simple!!”.

To realize Marble Boing VR I used Unity , which is quite a famous game engine that you can use to make games in C # or JavaScript.   If you want to learn how to use it, you can find some interesting tutorial here.   If like me, you already are familiar with this game engine you could find the following snippets relating to VR games interesting:

At this point, I was armed with glue and duct tape plus a dash of inventiveness and I created my first VR game from which I learned many new things such as:

  • The movement of the gamer’s head must be consistent with that in the 3D world to not cause nausea (Vestibular mismatch).
  • There are not many users currently interested in this kind of app.
  • It’s hard to find advertising systems compatible with the VR game so it’s complicated to make the game profitable.

Unfortunately, at this time, the game doesn’t have many downloads and perhaps the pay to play formula isn’t helping. So I decided that until the advertising systems get better, I’ll leave the app free to download.

Link Game